Productivity Growth and R&D Spending in Australian Broadacre Agriculture: Empirical Analyses by Using Alternative Approaches

Abstract

This thesis computes and decomposes productivity changes and investigates the effect of research and development (R&D) expenditure on productivity growth in Australian broadacre agriculture. The empirical results indicate slower TFP growth, driven by declining growth in technical change and find a cointegrated and causal relationship between public R&D and productivity growth. With R&D spending seen to increase agricultural productivity significantly, impact variations across states emerged as important to public R&D policy development in Australian agriculture.